Many current surveillance and security systems use a number of controllable network cameras interconnected over an existing corporate local area network (LAN) or wide area network (WAN). The network cameras, also referred to as internet protocol (IP) cameras, typically incorporate special purpose computers. These IP cameras constitute nodes in a computer network, and can generally be remotely controlled and operated by a user from a suitable interconnected desktop computer. The controllable cameras generally have pan, tilt and zoom capability, and may also be controlled in regard to other camera attributes such as lens aperture, infra-red or night vision capability, and so on. By using a suitable software application running on their desktop computer, the user typically can control pan, tilt and zoom aspects of the controllable camera, and consequently, can receive and view live images from the camera over the controllable field of view that is accessible by the camera.
Video surveillance systems of this type typically generate very large amounts of data. Storage servers, which can be implemented using corresponding software applications running on desktop computers, can be used to record this video footage to non-volatile storage devices such as hard disk drives (HDDs).